


Right By You

by doomedship



Category: Sanditon (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 09:21:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21033950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomedship/pseuds/doomedship
Summary: "Her mouth is dry as he draws up alongside the carriage, and bids the driver to stop. Dismounts."S01E08 final scene remastered, ft. hope and love.





	Right By You

**Author's Note:**

> I think we all feel similarly hurt and betrayed by last night. Here's attempt 1 at a fix. I'm too drained for a long 'un.

She's already lost in her thoughts when the carriage grinds to a halt. It confuses her, alone in the back, no reason to stop and so ready to run.

Still on the road to Sanditon, it is a long way back to Willingden and an even longer way back from grief.

There can be no reason to stop here, almost before they've even begun.

Unless.

She leans out of the carriage window, and her tattered heart gives an unwilling thump, unable to resist responding to the sight of him even now, cantering over the hillside like he's the north wind itself.

To catch her.

She steels herself, forbids her heart from leaping straight to hope.

She doesn't know if it would survive another fall.

Her mouth is dry as he draws up alongside the carriage, and bids the driver to stop. Dismounts.

She can only sit like a stone, until her fingers creep to the door and unlatch it.

She wills herself to look him in the eye. No cowering, no admission that the loss of him has diminished her, made her less of a person, for it has not. She will stand before him as she did the first time they met.

Before her heart became a battlefield of broken hopes.

And every time after that.

"Charlotte," he says, his voice a little breathless. His hair is tousled from the wind and she aches to her bones to run her fingers through it until it's smooth again.

"What is it?" she asks, willing her voice steady, even while his is not.

"I could not let you go," he says, and he sounds a truly broken man. There are tears in his eyes the like she has never seen, and they frighten her as much as they hurt her.

"Without a proper parting?" she asks, stifling a sob, and wonders if her words are as bitter to him as they taste on her tongue. He shuts his eyes and a tear escapes as he stumbles forward and reaches for her hand.

"No," he says. "Charlotte, I cannot marry her."

It is as if the world stops turning.

"What?" she breathes. "But you must. The money... The town. Tom."

"I know," he says, and it is a torment to hear him so shattered. "God, I know, Charlotte, but I cannot consign three lives to misery, I cannot. I do not love her, and eventually I will only break her heart. As I have broken yours, and my own in ever contemplating such a parting. I love you, Charlotte. I cannot go through with it."

The dams have already broken; she is crying openly and her face is wet with her tears of grief and incredulity and hope and despair.

"I am so sorry," she stutters, and she reaches for him, desperately, wildly, not caring that the driver sits a foot away and he is engaged to someone else. He takes her into his arms without a moment's hesitation. "Sidney, I'm so sorry."

"No, no," he tells her, stroking her face with his shaking hands. "You are the only one who has nothing to apologise for. You have done nothing wrong since you arrived in Sanditon, while I have brought you nothing but pain. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was wrong, Charlotte; how could it ever be the right thing if it's wrong by you?"

She looks up at him, her face wet and eyes puffy and his just the same, and she knows then that she can never, ever bear to let him go again. Once was one time too many; she will never get into a carriage to leave him and not return again.

"I love you," she says, and despite it all, despite everything, the tears in his eyes and the tremor in his body, he smiles powerfully and presses his forehead to hers.

"Then we will find a way," he whispers, before his lips crash against hers and they forget the world.


End file.
